Shutter Island

Everyone feels a little crazy sometimes. Maybe the guy in front of you in line at Burger King seems to be dealing with the concept of a menu for the very first time. Maybe everyone is showering praise on a film you just don’t like. Or maybe you’re having vivid dreams of your dead wife interspliced with flashbacks to a traumatic experience liberating the Dachau death camp at the end of World War II. If so, you may seek treatment at a mental health institution, but, uh-oh, it’s only 1954 and that means standards of care at asylums are . . . uh, let’s say substandard. Especially if the facility in question is the one featured in Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese’s 2010 psychological mystery-thriller. This gothic institution for the criminally insane may seem benevolent at first, but soon you’ll hear whispers of illegal experiments, people being lobotomized for asking too many questions, patients who come into the care of the island and are never heard from again. With the stage ominously set, a pair of federal marshals come onto the scene for a tense, foreboding offering from its famous director, bolstered by a strong cast and reliably excellent direction. Shutter island wasn’t a smash hit with critics, but audiences loved it for its dense atmosphere and stellar performances, and, at the request of one of our loyal listeners, the Magellan brothers were more than happy to take a look at one of Scorsese’s lesser loved movies. Duck the strait-jacket wielding orderlies and don’t take anything they give you, because all is not as it seems!